


Art Exchange

by LoveChilde



Category: White Collar
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 3, Community: purimgifts, Gen, Inspired by Art, Post-Canon, Postcards, ladies being awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-26 18:26:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6250642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoveChilde/pseuds/LoveChilde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post series. El finds a new hobby, and even more shared interests wirth Neal. Many postcards are exchanged, and fridge magnets are put to good use.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Art Exchange

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elrhiarhodan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elrhiarhodan/gifts).



Elizabeth starts painting during maternity leave. 

It’s something to do while Neal is asleep and she’s too restless to nap. It’s a way to channel her emotions- her therapist says it’s good for her, a way to deal with the baby, with Peter, with Neal being gone, with boredom. So El goes out and buys some watercolors and a few charcoal pencils, and on a whim, crayons, and gets creative.

At first, she doesn’t even try to draw anything specific. Abstracts are a good start, and she doesn’t need to think, trailing a paint brush over paper. Daubs and stripes of color, expressing and emotion rather than something concrete, visible, are the outlet she needs while dealing with a grieving husband, a colicky two months old and her own grief. It’s all the has the mental energy for, too. 

Peter can tell that she’s more relaxed and happier, even if she refuses to show him her first hesitant attempts at drawing _things_. In fact, she throws most of those out, not because they’re ugly or failures, but because there’s no point to keeping them and letting them pile up. She goes through a lot of paper in the first few months. 

Slowly, over time, she starts painting the things around her- dishes in the sink, the garden, and once, with less than impressive success, Satchmo. When she returns to work, Peter suggests that she take an art class. After a lot of consideration, she signs up for a beginners’ class. 

That first class teaches her several things more important than technique: the first is that she’ll never be a true artist. Her skill and inspiration are in the arrangement of objects; she creates gorgeous still life displays for the class, but can’t copy them on to paper worth a damn. The second is that she likes it anyway, and is content to draw away with no expectation of greatness.

***

When they find out Neal isn’t dead after all, when the laughing and crying and not-really-believing is over, they start sending postcards to each other. Or rather, Neal sends postcards, each bounced through half a dozen other destinations but ultimately landing in the Burkes’ mailbox. Using email still wouldn’t be safe, and postcards can be coded if necessary. Besides, El privately admits to herself that seeing Neal’s elegant handwriting is better proof that he’s alive and well than any cold typed text. 

Neal always sends separate postcards: one for Peter, one for El, and one for baby Neal (with occasional comments to Satchmo, which is too funny to be offensive). Peter’s are always nature scenes, wide open vistas and lush greenery, as a counter, Neal says, to the fact that Peter lives at work. El’s, however, are postcards of artwork- and always female artists. Postcard-sized prints of works by Artemisia Gentileschi, Romaine Brooks, Georgia O’Keefe and Mary Beale pile up in a special box, and sometimes hang on the fridge, to brighten up the kitchen. From Hildegard of Bingen to Dame Elizabeth Blackadder, El treasures them all.

Later, she doesn’t know what whim or caprice leads her to send Neal a small watercolor painting she’s made. It’s a simple abstract of their back yard in April, vivid colors and as many shades of green as she could fit on a page. She signs it E. Burke with a small flourish. 

A month later, the postcard arrives (Tea, by Mary Cassatt), along with a battered package containing a book of art history. 

It becomes a regular thing, over the next couple of years. El sends the occasional painting along with her letters, and Neal sends postcards, and sometimes books and paints. Peter complains that he never gets any gifts from Neal, but doesn’t seem to mind it that much. Neal never visits, even when El thinks he might be in the States, and they never suggest they should visit him, wherever he is. Knowing he’s well enough, and they’re all safe and as happy as they can be under the circumstances, is enough. 

***

Baby Neal starts grabbing for the crayons when he’s all of two years old. He has a good eye for color, even at that age. His first attempt at painting wins pride of place on the fridge. After six months of relentless scribbling (showing considerable focus for his age), a collection of blobs in green and yellow that Neal insists is mama, daddy and ‘Mo goes into an envelope with one of El’s paintings, and is sent to Neal. 

Six weeks later, there are three postcards- and three open plane tickets for Paris. All three postcards say only ‘Come on. It’s time.’

They only consider not going for a few hours. They both have the vacation time, baby Neal has his passport, they can leave any time. Two weeks later, they do.

A driver meets them at the airport and drives them into the city, tactfully ignoring the fact that Neal is in full meltdown mode after nine hours of flight and not enough sleep. He deposits them in front of a suburban building in a nice neighbourhood outside Paris itself, hands them a key and the code to the alarm, and says that ‘m’sieur’ will be in later, and they should let themselves in.

Neal’s place is everything El imagined it to be- tasteful without feeling over-designed, comfortable yet elegant, secure, but not stifling. What she doesn’t expect, would never have expected, is her art. Her paintings are _everywhere_. On the walls, framed on shelves; no other artwork, just hers. 

Her earliest scribblings, along with baby Neal’s green and yellow blobs, are on the fridge, held by baguette-shaped magnets. Next to them is a gorgeous painting obviously copied from a photo of baby Neal El had sent a year before.

They’re in a different country, in an unfamiliar home, and baby Neal is still sniffling in the aftermath of bawling- and still, El feels like she’s home.

**Author's Note:**

> None of this is mine, as usual. Happy last day of Purim!
> 
> Art credits, in historical order:  
> Universal Man by Hildegard von Bingen, 12th century  
> Judith and Her Maidservant by Artemisia Gentileschi, 1613-14  
> Self Portrait by Mary Beale, late 1600’s  
> Cup of Tea by Mary Cassatt, 1880  
> Blue and Green Music by Georgia O’Keeffe, 1921  
> Una, Lady Troubridge by Romaine Brooks, 1924  
> Still Life with Irises by Dame Elizabeth Blackadder, 2014


End file.
